One of the main problems with Windows Vista (and earlier versions) is that Windows consumes quite a lot of diskspace, with few means to trim down the installation. To make matters worse, Windows tends to accumulate a lot of megabytes and even gigabytes of space during its lifetime, leaving users at a loss as to how to reclaim this lost space. In a post on the Engineering 7 weblog, Microsoft program manager of the core OS deployment feature team (...) Michael Beck explains what Microsoft is doing in order to reduce the disk footprint of Windows 7.

Microsoft didn't impose enough restrictions on software vendors to prevent bloating the system. For example, some software will just put a huge .msi file somewhere in "installation data". Windows generally has a very bad software management system. Result is that Windows installations degrade over time and often a reinstall is needed to get a properly working thing without all the bloat.

As if this is not bad enough, Windows itself tends to accummulate lots of garbage data, caches, logs, update backups, registry blossoming, and whatnot.

My 1 year old XP installation now boots much slower than initially for unknown reason. Bootvis revealed that it spends 40 seconds in "Disk" loading part, which should normally take 2 seconds, for no clear reason - I failed to find any diagnostic tool that could reveal what's happening. Add to that various crapware startup tools that each app vendor feels free to add, and you get a 2-3 minute booting time.

On the other hand, I enjoy packaging systems found in Linux distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu. It's so much simpler to update the system and add / remove whatever i need. It's also easy to add additional repos when you need stuff that has legal problems (patented codecs etc.). The approach found in OSS feels light years ahead of the "unmanageable blob" approach of Windows.

As if this is not bad enough, Windows itself tends to accummulate lots of garbage data, caches, logs, update backups, registry blossoming, and whatnot.

Caches logs and backups aren't garbage...

My 1 year old XP installation now boots much slower than initially for unknown reason. Bootvis revealed that it spends 40 seconds in "Disk" loading part, which should normally take 2 seconds, for no clear reason - I failed to find any diagnostic tool that could reveal what's happening. Add to that various crapware startup tools that each app vendor feels free to add, and you get a 2-3 minute booting time.

5 bucks says you need to defrag.

If that isn't it, check out what is loading at startup, and what services are set to autorun with msconfig. If you can't figure out what is taking so long, open up your logs, and see if there is anything timing out in the application log or system log. If you aren't the kind of person that uses them, there are probably several hundred thousand entries at this point, so feel free to clear them then reboot to get a better picture of what is going on.